Creating a monster: The multitasking Bloomberg terminal, the one-time unassailable tool of financial experts, is drawing attention from the Fed and the Treasury Department for questionable practices. (Bloomberg)

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Bloomberg LP appears to have crossed the line that separates its news-gathering operations from the business side.

For years, Bloomberg News reporters were given access to instant message exchanges between clients and representatives on the company’s 24-hour help desk, insiders told The Post.

By hitting the “help” key twice on a Bloomberg terminal, users can submit a help request, such as how to use a specific function or where to look up a particular bond index. The help function is one of most commonly used on a Bloomberg terminal, which costs users as much as $20,000 a year to rent.

Such help requests, which most of Bloomberg’s customers had assumed were off-limits to the news desk, could have provided valuable insights to reporters eager to break news on specific clients.

A spokesman told The Post that the practice of allowing reporters to view client inquiries was intended to assist customer service reps in answering questions but has since been discontinued.

“There has to be a firewall between reporters and people who deal with the hardware,” said Paul Argenti, professor of communications at Dartmouth University’s Tuck School of Business.

Bloomberg LP has a sizable journalism operation, Bloomberg News, that employs 2,400 reporters and editors; it also has a small army of computer programmers, sales people and customer service reps that support sales of its terminals.

In addition to the help function, reporters used a combination of two commands — “UUID,” which stands for unique user identification, and “Z” — to glean information about customers’ terminal usage.

Bloomberg says those functions have also been shut down as the company scrambles to address a spying scandal that has spread from Wall Street to Washington.

The Federal Reserve and the US Treasury also expressed concerns that reporters were using terminals to track Fed chief Ben Bernanke and ex-Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, according to a CNBC report.

The news comes on the heels of The Post’s bombshell report that Goldman Sachs had confronted the company with concerns that reporters were monitoring bank employees.

Bloomberg, which generated $8 billion in revenue last year, admitted to “mistakes” in allowing reporters to access “limited” client data and appointed Steve Ross to a newly created role as data compliance officer.

A company spokesman said it launched an internal review last month.

While Bloomberg doesn’t appear to have crossed a legal line, its actions were widely viewed as a major breach of privacy.

“It’s a very slippery slope, and it can completely break the trust that you have with your clients,” said Dartmouth’s Argenti. “This is going to be a long, long, bad road for Bloomberg.”